Concerned Citizens

Things have been changing at Concerned Citizens and I thought it might be good to provide an update on where the site is now. As I stated in the About section this is really a technology experiment with WordPress and social media to understand how it can be applied in society. To do so required content which has now become a daily passion and commitment. Readers have been increasing and the dialogue in the postings has been great, make that incredible. To keep up with a growing audience I have been making changes.

Registration

To start with I’ve instituted the requirement to register to post comments. This was done to help avoid having anonymous users in the blog. Having everyone register to comment will help in moderating the comments and provide the ability to ban users that are abusive or inflammatory. The registration is simple and one time. When you log in you can have WordPress remember you so you don’t have to log in again.

Ratings

I put ratings in to allow users to rate postings to help provide feedback to me on what is interesting and what is a dog. Hopefully the site can adjust to meet the needs of people in San Antonio and South Texas to provide a more complete viewpoint of the community and politics. Ratings have become a standard in social media and it just made sense. It also allows users to comment on a posting without having to actually write a comment. I have also added ratings to comments to allow people to rate comments they think are good on the site as well. This is experimental as I don’t know how that will factor in.

Special Sections

This is an area I’m experimenting with to provide focus areas for particular topics. As you can imagine the mayoral race is really heating up in San Antonio. I haven’t built this page out but expect to see it morph into a more topical view of the mayoral race to allow a quick glance at the issues and postings. That’s the main reason I chose WordPress hosted at my provider to give me the flexibility to do things like that.

Upcoming Features

Contributors and Authors

I’m not the only one who has good ideas and opinions. Many of the readers who have commented have provided great thoughts and ideas on issues. I want to open this up to allow registered users the ability to post their own blog entries with full capabilities including comments. Granted those postings will be in a special section but they will be listed on the site. If I feel an issue would be better served on the front page I want to promote it. This is a best practice I have seen used at the Burnt Orange Report and it makes sense. It’s really leveraging crowd-sourcing for content.

Community Section

I would like to explore a community section where registered users can post community events or information. This will allow readers the ability to find out the latest on things like meetings, rallies, or anything else relevant in the community. I’m not trying to make this a community bulletin board but want to explore the concept. This is a lower priority item.

Okay I’ve given you kind of a glimpse into what is planned for Concerned Citizens. I’d like to hear from you on what you think might be useful or helpful for a site like this. I’ll collect the ideas and may put a poll up for people to rate the major ideas for future innovations.